I think people with legitimate criticisms are starting to get really tired being called a racist or a misogynist. 99% of the reviews aren't about wokeness at all. They're about the writing, the pacing and the how unbelievably dull the show is.
I've only watched the first episode so far, and... I'm not very impressed.
The narrative is really awful - it feels like the characters are reading verbatim from a book, rather than reciting a screenplay adaption. The acting and behaviour of characters is very wooden, stiff, amateurish and unrealistic - maybe that's just what happens when actors have to recite such "formal" narrative, or maybe it's the actors' ability. The narrative and acting are totally unconvincing.
Thus far, the set, lighting CGI have been pretty disappointing too - I don't really understand why everything has to look like it's straight out of a cartoon, with eye-popping saturation levels. Or why all the CGI looks too "smooth" and strangely lit to look authentic. Or why so many of the buildings etc just look so... improbable.
All the characters look like they just came out of a salon - obviously brand new, pristine clothing, make up absolutely plastered on with a trowel, not a hair out of place etc. It looks very silly, and adds to the overall amateurish vibe.
And what on earth was that nonsense with the elves all standing in formation, perfectly upright and perfectly still, on the deck of a small boat sailing across an ocean?!
Overall, I felt like I was watching a theatre play, rather than a TV series. I think I read Amazon spent half a billion dollars on it, which is true sounds basically fraudulent.
I also want to add that I've been using IMDB for something like 20 years, and have rated over 1,000 movies and TV shows - what Amazon have done here is totally destroy my trust in IMDB ratings :(
I don't disagree, but it's tough to tell who's really doing the "lumping" of legit criticism with political tribalism.
She-hulk got review-bombed before the first episode came out. After watching it and enjoying it, my frustration at the fact that it's tough to criticize it without feeling lumped together with sexists wasn't at the "woke" crowd, but rather at the people who'd buried it in negative reviews before it even aired simply because they hate anything with a wiff of liberal politics.
When I happen to feel critical of something that the woke or anti-woke crowd is critical of for their own irrational reasons, I am angry at that crowd, not at everybody else who is also angry at that crowd and who can not realistically be expected to distinguish every single individual critical comment when judging the legitimacy of an aggregate number.
In my experience, people directing anger the other way frequently end up declaring that they are now, in some capacity, on the side of the irrational crowd in question, with a "YOU made me do this" rationalization, which is pretty highly transparent.
Note that this is not to say there is no such thing as people doing the unfair lumping-in you describe on an individual basis, which is indeed its own problem.
But also note that, if you frequent the places where people feel more free to be openly anti-woke, you will find that those who would like to make irrational anti-woke criticisms also exaggerate the more acceptable criticisms you describe. This is because the show or movie is beyond merely "badly written" for them and has triggered their "hate" feelings. So, some amount of reviews critical of non-political/racial/etc things like pacing end up being magnified anyway by the hate the reviewer has underneath.
People were up in arms before a single episode aired, because they saw a fictional species (dwarf) had dark skin. many of those people have now pivoted their arguments against the show to being about pacing, writing (note: I’m in no way implying this is you, I haven’t seen any LotR series opinions on HN) - but the racist stuff has already occurred
I wonder how well it would go down if someone made a show about slavery in USA with all of the black people being played by non-blacks... For inclusivity you know? Get some Asians there. Maybe gender swap the historical big figures to boot and have them speak Chinese or something.
A better comparison would be Black Panther or Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon - fictional stories and worlds loosely inspired by real places, just like Middle Earth.
So here's the thing - in reality black slaves actually existed. So if you cast a white guy to play a black slave then yeah people would be a little bit confused. Dwarves are a fictional species which have never existed, and even if all dwarves have been described explicitly as being white in the books (and I don't think they have) there has been enough artistic license taken in the various recent films that straying from this is really not too outrageous.
I think you're kind of revealing a bit more about own feelings on race than you realise.
How do black dwarves make sense? Their entire species lives deep underground and never sees the light of day, so they don't need to evolve to protect their skin from UV rays.
It's not like humans randomly became black or white, skin color is a result of thousands of years of evolution because of our surroundings. If you're going to apply the real world here, then you have to admit that black skinned dwarves make no sense from a biological point of view, since as we can see in the real world things tend to get paler and paler the less UV they're exposed to.
I don't know enough about Tolkien elves to comment on there being no black elves though
You really really didn't think this through. While they live deep underground and don't need to protect from UV light, they also don't need to have white skin to let in sunlight for vitamin synthesis.
In the real world, skin didn't get paler simply because there wasn't enough UV. It got paler because less sunlight meant that darker skin couldn't absorb enough light for synthesis. If this wasn't case, our skins would still be dark.
So there is absolutely 1000% no reason at all why their skin would be any specific color. Dark or white, all are justifiable.
> How do black dwarves make sense? Their entire species lives deep underground and never sees the light of day, so they don't need to evolve to protect their skin from UV rays.
This is EXACTLY my issue with the show. This kind of forced diversity fuccs up the lore and detaches me from the depicted universe. At least make them all of the same skin color so it is coherent.
So you wouldn’t mind white Wakandans? One or two Vanilla Panthers? How about caucasian voodoo gods, or demons of Japanese myth? They’re fictional too.
Of course that would be silly, and we both know why. Tolkien’s work is explicitly based on Norse myth and the peoples of Northern Europe, who were and are quite real. He wrote about these intentions and influences at length.
There’s no need for writers to rely on European culture as a crutch. I’d personally love to see more epics set in the Mali Empire, Ghana Empire, or Kingdom of Dahomey. Sub-Saharan Africa has lots of its own rich mythology, too. It seems bizarre that besides Black Panther, the most I’ve seen these stories represented on TV is still the 1990s PBS series “Wishbone”.
Since there were no dark skin in depictions that are chronologicallly later, the two trilogies we already watched, it means that some terrible genocidal racial cleansing happened in between.
The minute you say "the elves weren't dark!" I'm probably going to start doubting your opinion on the matter almost immediately, as whether they were pale as a sheet or black as coal has nothing to do with what they represent.
